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The American Prospect - articles by authorenA Message for Progressiveshttp://prospect.org/article/message-progressives-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p> Progressives are not fond of "talking points": We like to think in sentences, paragraphs, and even articles and books if it takes that long to fully flesh out an idea. Our ideas, so the story goes, are more "nuanced" than our opponents', and to some extent, that is true. Our Neanderthal cousins (I mean in evolution, not in the Senate, although they are there, too) might have expressed many of their basic thoughts with grunts and single-word utterances: Food? Good. Snake? Bad. </p>
<p>The same is true of contemporary conservative intellectual cave dwellers, or at least of their leaders in Congress: Taxes? Bad. Guns? Good. Government? Bad! Gitmo? Good. In fact, it is difficult to think of a conservative issue in which any qualifier is even necessary. </p>
<p>On the other hand, the idea that progressive messaging problems reflect primarily the nuance of our thoughts is a mistaken conceit, and a very costly one. The subtitle of this article is one of the most powerful statements we can make to the American people -- and especially to voters in the center -- and absolutely nothing the other side can say on economics can beat it. Or try this one: "I want to see the words 'Made in America' again." </p>
<p>Begin a message with that deceptively simple statement of values -- of work, American wages and benefits, America's place in the world, pride in what we produce -- and there is nothing the other side can say that can come within 40 points of that simple sentence in message testing or, more important, in electoral politics. (Just ask any of the Democratic leaders who ran with some variant of this message in November and now have the distinction among both their colleagues and their constituents of still having their job.) </p>
<p>Did we really need to give tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires, paid for by the working- and middle-class kids of the future as they stock Chinese goods at Wal-Mart (the much vaunted "service economy")? No. A simple, value-laden statement that I tested in September beat John Boehner's and Mitch McConnell's toughest language about "job creators" and "job-killing taxes" by nearly 40 points: "Millionaires and billionaires should be <i>giving</i> to charity, not getting it." Those words, had they been repeated by the White House and Democrats at all levels of government, could have seared into the brain of every American the difference between the two parties. Contained within that six-second sound bite were several key American middle-class values -- fairness, responsibility, opportunity, generosity, community -- that could have rolled off of every progressive tongue from mid-September until the Great Capitulation three months later -- and made that capitulation not only unnecessary but politically untenable. </p>
<p>Those are just single-line talking points. Let's expand our lexicon to two sentences: "<i>We</i> stand with the working- and middle-class Americans and the small businesses that create two-thirds of the jobs in this country. <i>They</i> stand with the millionaires and CEOs and big businesses that ship our jobs overseas." </p>
<p>That should have been a message Democrats made sure voters heard every time they turned on the news in the run-up to the election, and it should be the Democratic message going forward. As Republicans are fond of saying -- and they are right -- it's fine to compromise on policy but not on principle. Compromising on principle appears -- and is -- unprincipled. The danger in this "bipartisan" season of cheer, when a handful of Senate Republicans finally acquiesced in a series of policies that large majorities of Americans supported, is that Democrats will embrace the conservative narrative that because of the election results, they now have to abandon common sense, common values, and common decency -- even though Democrats still control the Senate and the White House. If progressives want to be relevant again, it is time to press "reset." </p>
<p><b>The problem is not</b> that the American people fail to comprehend our "nuanced" ideas. They may not know that in the last 30 years, the CEO of their own company (if they still are employed) has gone from making as much in a day as they make in three weeks to making more in a day than they make in an entire year. Maybe they can't cite the statistics. They have, however, seen their own sacrifices, as they cut back once again on Christmas purchases from Target, while the Saks across the mall bustles. </p>
<p>Many Americans may not know that America, once an education leader among developed nations, is now ranked 12th when it comes to young people with a college education. But they know they haven't been able to put away a dime for their kids' education and have no idea how or when they ever will. </p>
<p>They may not understand the economics of job creation. But they saw with their own eyes that compassion for their suffering didn't rise to the level of compassion for the big banks on Wall Street. And in the absence of a compelling progressive narrative, they were willing to listen to snake-oil salesmen selling tea -- who told them a good story about what would make their financial situation better. </p>
<p>It didn't help that the candidates Americans voted for in 2008 and 2010 didn't explain how we got into the current mess or how we are going to get out of it -- other than to blame the big, bad Republicans with their super-minorities in both houses of Congress for saying no to everything. Oddly, the opposition of Democrats seldom obstructed George W. Bush when, over eight years, he pushed through nearly everything he wanted without ever having more than 55 Republicans in the Senate. </p>
<p>The problem is that we've given the American people the choice between the party of sadism and the party of masochism, between the party of sanctimonious bullying and the party of fear and trembling. That's not the choice we should be offering. We need an alternative to the narrative that government is the problem, not the solution (and hence to the wisdom of tax cuts, spending cuts, and blaming municipal and federal employees for our problems). Presented with a sensible narrative of what's happened to their country, Americans will know that government is neither the primary cause nor the primary solution to our problems. Here's an example: "It's time politicians stopped running for or against government and started running it well." </p>
<p>So let's tell the American people that the days of capitulating to the corporate special interests are over and that we progressives stand for making America <i>America</i> again -- a country that leads the world in manufacturing ideas and products, where the people who produce those ideas and products share in the fruits of their productivity -- and that we're going to make sure the American dream extends to everyone willing to work for it. (In that respect, repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" was a giant step forward, for which Democrats in Congress are to be congratulated.) </p>
<p>If we want to expand our lexicon just one more step to a paragraph-length narrative, here's one that starts with that "Made in America" sentiment and beats -- by more than 40 points with swing voters -- the toughest, most disingenuous free-market, deficit-hawk language the right can muster: </p>
<blockquote><p>I want to see the words "Made in America" again. Reclaiming our place as the world's leader in manufacturing and agriculture isn't just essential to our economic strength; it's essential to our national security. Imagine if we had fought World War II without manufacturing plants and American-grown food. It's time we negotiate trade agreements that lift up American workers, not bring down their pay and benefits to the levels workers in Mexico and China receive. It's time we stop rewarding companies that ship our jobs overseas, and stop giving tax breaks to companies that shelter their money offshore. It's time we stop giving money to the big banks that are strangling small businesses, which are the engine of economic growth and job creation. It's time we manufacture the clean, safe energies of the 21st century, like wind and solar power, so we don't have to depend on other countries for fuel. We've led every technological revolution of the last century, and there's no reason we can't lead this one. It's time we balance free trade with fair trade, so that the working people who contribute to the creation of wealth share in it. </p></blockquote>
<p>This message weaves together values that appeal to Americans across the political spectrum. It's about American leadership and America's place in the world and about expanding the concept of "security" from defense to economic security. It's about energy independence and how we can drill all the way to China, but we'll only see wind turbines when we get there. It's about fairness versus greed. It's about economic growth and prosperity. These aren't just the values of the "professional left" or people mainstream journalists undercut every time they say that this or that policy has "liberals" furious. These are American values. </p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 08 Feb 2011 02:22:17 +0000149134 at http://prospect.orgDrew WestenGuns on the Brainhttp://prospect.org/article/guns-brain
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><i>Adapted from the forthcoming book, </i><a href="http://americanprospect.bookswelike.net/isbn/1586484257">The Political Brain</a></p>
<p>On April 16, Seung-Hui Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia, carried two semiautomatic pistols onto campus and killed 32 people. It was the deadliest shooting in modern American history.</p>
<p>The following week, a nation listened in horror as witnesses recounted stories of how they had barricaded desks against their classroom doors to keep the psychotic young man from entering, only to hear him spend a round of ammo, drop the spent clip, and reload in seconds. </p>
<p>Democratic leaders offered the requisite condolences. But that's all they offered. They didn't mention that the Republican Congress had let the Brady Act, which banned the sale of semiautomatic weapons, sunset in 2004. They didn't mention that in the decade or so after the passage of that act, 100,000 felons lost their right to bear arms, but not a single hunter lost that right. Instead, the Democrats ran for political cover, waiting for the smoke to clear. </p>
<p>This wasn't the first time Democrats scattered when threatened with Republican gunshots. They were silent as the Beltway sniper terrorized our nation's capital a month before the midterm elections of 2002. And they have been silent or defensive on virtually every "wedge" issue that has divided our nation for much of the last 30 years. When the Republicans tried to play the hate card again in 2006, this time under the cover of immigration reform, Democrats scrambled to pull together a "policy" on immigration, instead of simply asking, "What's the matter, gays aren't working for you anymore?" </p>
<p>So how did we find ourselves where we are today, with an electorate that has finally figured out that the once larger-than-life Wizard of Terror was nothing but a projection on a screen -- and an opposition party that can't seem to find its heart, its brain, or its courage, and instead wonders what's the matter with Kansas? </p>
<p>And most importantly, how do we find our way back home? </p>
<p></p><center>---</center>
<p><b>Visions of Mind</b>
</p>
<p> Behind every campaign lies a vision of mind -- often implicit, rarely articulated, and generally invisible to the naked eye. Traces of that vision can be seen in everything a campaign does or doesn't do. </p>
<p>The vision of mind that has captured the imagination of Democratic strategists for much of the last 40 years -- a <i>dispassionate mind</i> that makes decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions -- bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work. When strategists start from this vision of mind, their candidates typically lose. </p>
<p>Democrats typically bombard voters with laundry lists of issues, facts, figures, and policy positions, while Republicans offer emotionally compelling appeals, whether to voters' values, principles, or prejudices. As a result, we have seen only one Democrat elected and reelected to the White House since Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Bill Clinton, who, like Roosevelt, understood how to connect with voters emotionally) and only one Republican fail to do so (George Bush Senior, who ran like a Democrat and paid for it). </p>
<p>Our brains are nothing but vast networks of neurons. Of particular importance for understanding politics are "networks of associations" -- bundles of thoughts, feelings, sounds, images, memories, and emotions that have become linked through experience. People can't tell you much about what's in those networks, or about what's likely to change them (which happen to be the central determinants of voting behavior). They can't tell you because they don't have conscious access to them, any more than they can tell you what's going on in their pancreas. And if you ask them, they often get it wrong. </p>
<p>In polls and focus groups, voters told John Kerry's consultants that they didn't like "negativity," so the consultants told Kerry to avoid it. To what extent those voters just didn't know the power of negative appeals on their own networks, or didn't want to admit it, is unclear. What is clear is that George W. Bush won the election by spending 75 percent of his budget on negativity against a candidate whose refusal to fight back projected nothing but weakness in the face of aggression -- precisely the narrative Bush was constructing about Kerry. </p>
<p>If you start with the assumption of a dispassionate mind -- of voters who weigh the utility of each candidate's stand on a range of issues and calculate which candidate has the greater utility -- you inevitably turn to pollsters as oracles to divine which issues are up, which are down, and which are best avoided. The vision of the dispassionate mind represents public opinion in one dimension -- a straight line, from up to down, high to low, pro-choice to anti-abortion, anti-gun to pro-gun. </p>
<p>But this is a one-dimensional rendering of three-dimensional data. If you start with networks, you think very differently about campaigns, from the way you interpret polling data to the way you handle the wedge issues that have run Democratic campaigns into the ground for decades. On virtually every contentious political issue -- abortion, welfare, gay marriage, tax cuts, and, yes, guns -- polls show a seemingly "mixed" pattern of results, with the electorate endorsing what seem like contradictory positions. The vast majority of Americans support gun regulations but also support the right to bear arms. So are Americans pro-gun or anti-gun? </p>
<p>That's the wrong question. And it inevitably leads Democratic strategists to the wrong answer: "Take the issue off the table -- it's radioactive." </p>
<p>This kind of one-dimensional thinking fails to appreciate that voters may be of two minds about an issue. The same issue often activates two or more networks that lead to different feelings in the same person (e.g., concern about guns in the hands of criminals, and support for the rights of law-abiding citizens to protect their families), and different groups of voters may have radically different associations to the same thing (whether to guns, gays, abortion, or immigrants). Unfortunately, these are just the kinds of issues that arouse the most passion and, hence, have the biggest impact on both voting and get-out-the-vote efforts. And they are generally the issues Democrats try to avoid. </p>
<p>If you cede the contentious issues, you cede passion to the other side. And given that people vote with their "guts," if you cede passion, you ultimately concede elections. </p>
<p>Republicans go straight for these gut issues, and they now have the confidence that they can do so even when support for their position is in the range of 30 percent, as is the case with their absolutist stance on abortion (that abortion is murder and should be illegal under all circumstances) and guns (that the right to bear arms is inviolable, no matter what the death toll). Democrats usually don't contest them, the public never hears a compelling counternarrative, and public opinion gradually shifts to the right. </p>
<p>If you understand how networks work, you understand that candidates should never avoid anything -- particularly when the other side is talking about it. Doing so gives the opposition exclusive rights to the networks that create and constitute public opinion. </p>
<p></p><center>---</center>
<p><b>Hunting for Principles</b>
</p>
<p>If ever there was an issue on which Americans are of two minds, it is guns. Most Americans believe in the Second Amendment, but most Americans also support a host of restrictions on gun sales and ownership. In the 2004 pre-election Harris poll, slightly more than half of Americans reported favoring stricter gun laws, but far fewer -- only one in five -- wanted to relax the current laws. (When Harris framed the question more specifically in terms of <i>handguns</i>, the percentages became even more lopsided, closer to 3-to-1 in favor of stricter regulations.) Only a small majority, however, supports tougher gun regulations, and many of these people are clustered in large urban areas and on the coasts. This is one of those mixed pictures that lead Democratic strategists to run for the hills. </p>
<p>Al Gore epitomized Democrats' discomfort with guns in an exchange with Bush in their second presidential debate in 2000: </p>
<blockquote><p><b>MODERATOR:</b> So on guns, somebody wants to cast a vote based on your differences, where are the differences?</p>
<p><b>GORE:</b> ... I am for licensing by states of new handgun purchases ... because too many criminals are getting guns. There was a recent investigation of the number in Texas who got, who were given concealed-weapons permits in spite of the fact that they had records. And the<i> Los Angeles Times</i> spent a lot of ink going into that. But I am not for doing anything that would affect hunters or sportsmen, rifles, shotguns, existing handguns. I do think that sensible gun-safety measures are warranted now. </p>
<p>Look, this is the year -- this is in the aftermath of Columbine, and Paducah, and all the places in our country where the nation has been shocked by these weapons in the hands of the wrong people. The woman who bought the guns for the two boys who did that killing at Columbine said that if she had had to give her name and fill out a form there, she would not have bought those guns.</p>
</blockquote>
<p> Behind this response we can hear the whirring of the dispassionate mind -- the gratuitous reference to the <i>Los Angeles Times</i>, the reference to Columbine without offering an evocative image. But what is most striking about this response is the lack of any coherent <i>principle</i> that might explain why Gore would place restrictions on new handguns but not on old ones. (Are the existing ones too rusty to kill anybody?) Nor does he justify why he is excluding hunting rifles, although the viewer can infer (correctly) that he wants to get elected.</p>
<p>Bush couldn't respond to the most powerful part of Gore's response, about the woman who had handed the guns to the Columbine shooters. So after reiterating his opposition to requiring gun purchasers even to show photo identification, he switched to a "culture of life" message (aimed at activating anti-abortion networks under the cover of guns) and a "culture of love" message (suggesting that somewhere out there there's a child longing to be told he's loved -- which would presumably prevent massacres like Columbine). Bush's message was not only cognitively incoherent; it was actually lifted from a phenomenally moving eulogy Gore had delivered at Columbine. </p>
<p>True to the dispassionate vision of the mind, Gore failed to mention that he had been at Columbine. With all their debate preparation, his campaign strategists never realized that the vice president's best weapon on guns was that magnificent eulogy, in which he artfully invoked "that voice [that] says to our troubled souls: peace, be still. The Scripture promises that there is a peace that passes understanding." </p>
<p>Bush presented Gore with a golden opportunity to personalize the issue, to put the face of a child on it. With a response like the following, he would have placed in bold relief the extraordinary indifference implicit in Bush's response and the extremism of the conservative narrative Bush was embracing: </p>
<blockquote><p>Governor, I walked with those shocked and grieving parents, teachers, and children at Columbine; I shed tears with them; and I delivered a eulogy that Sunday by their graveside. I remembered with them the heroism of their beloved coach and teacher Dave Sanders, who bravely led so many to safety but never made it out of the building himself. I remembered with them a young girl named Cassie Bernall, whose final words were "Yes, I do believe in God."</p>
<p>I <i>just told you</i> how the woman who bought the guns that took the lives of Dave Sanders and Cassie Bernall wouldn't have done it if she'd just had to fill out a form and show a photo ID. And you<i> still </i>can't feel for Coach Sanders' wife and children, who'll never wrap their loving arms around him again? You still can't weep for Cassie's parents? You <i>still</i> think it's sensible to require someone to show a photo ID to <i>cash a check</i> but that it's too much to ask that they show an ID to <i>buy a handgun</i>? </p>
<p>Americans do have a clear choice in this election. And it<i> is</i> about a culture of life. They can do something to honor the lives of those who died that day at Columbine. Or they can vote for a man who, as governor of Texas, signed a law allowing people to bring guns into <i>church</i>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Although most Americans were much closer to Gore than Bush on guns in the 2000 Harris poll, they thought Bush was stronger on gun control. Although Kerry had hunted all his life, Bush was the overwhelming choice of American sportsmen, even though he'd purchased his Crawford ranch as a prop only two years before running for president -- something Democrats never thought to mention in two presidential campaigns. Nor did they mention, as James Carville and Paul Begala have pointed out, that Bush had stocked his ranch's man-made lakes with fish because the river running through it was too polluted.</p>
<p>These are just the kinds of facts and images that win elections. And they are just the kinds of facts and images that <i>should</i> win elections, because they tell where a candidate really stands, not just where he stands for photo ops. </p>
<p>This is precisely the kind of information that informs the emotions of the electorate. </p>
<p></p><center>---</center>
<p><b>Gunning for Common Ground</b>
</p>
<p>To understand the poll numbers on guns in three dimensions, you have to consider the different associations the word "gun" evokes in urban and rural America. If you prime voters who have grown up in big cities with the word "gun," you are likely to activate a network that includes "handguns," "murder," "mugging," "robbery," "killing," "crime," "inner-city violence," "machine guns," and "criminals." If someone in New York City is packing a piece, he isn't hunting quail. </p>
<p>But now suppose we prime a group of voters -- let's make them men -- in rural America with precisely the same word, "gun." This time, the associations that come to mind include "hunt," "my daddy," "my son," "gun shows," "gun collection," "rifle," "shotgun," "protecting my family," "deer," "buddies," "beer," "my rights" -- and a host of memories that link past and future generations. A voter who lives in a rural area knows that if an armed intruder enters his house, it could take a long time before the county sheriff arrives. The notion of being defenseless doesn't sit well with southern and rural males, whose identity as men is strongly associated with the ability to protect their families. </p>
<p>There are some voters you just can't win. As my colleagues and I discovered when we scanned the brains of partisans during the last presidential election, roughly a third of Americans' minds won't bend to the left no matter what you do or say (roughly the percent who continue to support Bush). But southern and rural voters are not unambivalent in their feelings toward guns. Rural voters have no fondness for what happened at Columbine or Virginia Tech, and they have little genuine affection for handguns or automatic weapons. If the National Rifle Association scares them into supporting semiautomatics for felons and teenagers with its slippery-slope argument about "taking away your guns," the fault lies as much with the Democratic Party, which has put such a powerful safety lock on its own values that no one knows where Democrats really stand -- on this or virtually any other moral issue. </p>
<p>When a party finds itself courting potentially winnable voters who have seemingly incompatible associations, the first task of its strategists should be to look for two things: areas of ambivalence and ways of bridging seemingly unconnected networks to create common ground. The areas of ambivalence on guns are clear, but Democrats should be searching for the common ground that connects left to right on guns. One of the most powerful "bridging networks" revolves around law and order. A central appeal of conservative ideology is that it emphasizes the protection of law-abiding citizens. Those in the cities who want gun control for the protection of their families and those in the countryside who decry the lawlessness of the cities share the same concern: the freedom and safety of law-abiding citizens. Democrats should also connect the dots between the extremist message of the NRA and another powerful network: terrorism. You can't fight a war against terrorists if you grant them unrestricted access to automatic weapons on your own soil. </p>
<p>This convergence of networks suggests a simple, commonsense, principled stand on guns that Democrats could run with all over the country: </p>
<blockquote><p>Our moral vision on guns reflects one simple principle: that gun laws should guarantee the freedom and safety of<i> all </i>law-abiding Americans. We stand with the majority of Americans who believe in the right of law-abiding citizens to own guns to hunt and protect their families. And we stand with that same majority of Americans who believe that felons, terrorists, and troubled teenagers don't have the right to bear arms that threaten the safety of our children. We therefore support the right to bear arms, but not to bear arms designed for no other purpose than to take another person's life.</p></blockquote>
<p></p><center>---</center>
<p><b>Shooting Blanks</b>
</p>
<p>At Virginia Tech, we witnessed another Terri Schiavo moment, when Democrats could have asserted a progressive moral alternative to an extremist narrative of the far right. But once again, they cowered in the corner, hoping to convince the American public that they're <i>almost</i> as right as the Republicans. Unfortunately, you never win elections by being almost as principled as the other side. If only one side is talking about its values, its candidate -- not the moral runner-up -- will win over voters. </p>
<p>With the polls strongly at their backs, Democrats had a historic opportunity to turn the Republicans' indifference to the suffering at Virginia Tech into a moral condemnation, and to put every Republican in Congress on record as caring more about the blood-soaked dollars of the NRA than about the lives of our children. Instead, they turned tail and ran, fearing they'd be branded as "anti-gun" and pushed down the slippery slope the NRA has used to pick them off at the ballot box for years: "<i>They want to</i> take away your gun." </p>
<p>But you only have to worry about getting branded and being pushed down slippery slopes if you're playing checkers while the other side is playing chess -- worrying about their next move when you should be anticipating six moves ahead. Democrats didn't do what they knew was the right thing because of their concerns about the political fortunes of red-state Democrats like Heath Shuler in North Carolina. But they wouldn't have had to worry -- and they would have picked up a lot of "security moms" and plenty of dads -- if they had simply put <i>Shuler</i> in front of the camera, flanked by a couple of pro-gun Democrats like Montana Senator Jon Tester, with a hunting rifle over his left shoulder and an M-16 over his right, armed with a simple message: </p>
<blockquote><p>This [pointing to the gun on his left] is a rifle. <br />
This [the gun on his right] is an assault weapon. <br />
People like you and me use this one [left] to hunt. <br />
Criminals, terrorists, and deranged teenagers use this one [right] to hunt police officers and our children. <br />
Law-abiding citizens have the right to own one of these [left]. <br />
Nobody has the right to threaten our kids' safety with one of these [right]. <br />
Any questions?</p></blockquote>
<p>If you can't speak the truth and win elections, you need to learn another language. The language that wins elections is the language of the heart.</p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 20 May 2007 20:56:51 +0000146312 at http://prospect.orgDrew WestenBranding the Democratshttp://prospect.org/article/branding-democrats
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Revenge can be sweet. Neuroscientists have discovered circuits in the brain that become active with the feelings of "sweet revenge," and it would take a saint or a stroke victim not to experience some pleasure watching Democrats regain the power of the subpoena after five long years. But with 18 months until the 2008 election, and with millions of voters swinging away from the GOP but unsure whom, exactly, they're swinging toward, the mantra of the left should be, in the inelegant language of advertising, <i>branding</i>.</p>
<p>Americans don't like what it means to be a Republican, but they don't know what it means to be a Democrat. </p>
<p>To build a coherent brand in politics -- a compelling perception of what your party stands for and why a voter would want to stand with you -- you have to do four things. The first is to use compelling language and imagery. If you want the average American to care about whether Karl Rove testifies under oath or just has a "chat" off the record, you can talk about the importance of having verbatim transcripts, and most voters will agree with your arguments. But if you want the electorate to <i>feel</i> why it matters, look straight into the camera and admonish the president, "Mr. Bush, just what it is about 'So help me God' that you find so offensive?" </p>
<p>The reality is that the only reason Bush wouldn't want to see Karl Rove with his left hand on the Bible and his right hand in the air is that he wouldn't want him to have to tell the truth. Invoking that image is worth a thousand arguments. </p>
<p>The second component of effective branding is telling a good story, both about yourself and the opposition. Our brains naturally search for story structures: an initial situation with a problem to be solved, protagonists trying to solve it, antagonists who get in the way, and a dénouement that leads to resolution of the problem. This structure, understood implicitly by every child, helped our ancestors transmit knowledge over generations for thousands of years before the rise of literacy. Conveying a message in a form the brain expects renders that message both understandable and memorable. </p>
<p>House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Syria spoke volumes about the failure of the president and the Secretary of State to do so themselves. But the best way to make sure voters pick up the <i>right</i> volume is to offer a simple narrative before embarking on the trip: "If the president isn't going to act like a grown-up and talk to people he doesn't like, we're going to have to do it for him. When grown-ups disagree, they talk with each other. We've seen what happens -- in Syria, Iran, and North Korea -- when you simply demand that other countries do what you say: They do exactly what you don't want them to do." Setting up the story line in advance renders the president's denunciation of Pelosi's visit much more difficult -- and makes his public tantrums in the new bipartisan world seem even more petulant. </p>
<p>The third key to branding reflects the way our minds associate one idea with another. Presuming Bush doesn't reap an unexpected public opinion windfall (say, from a terrorist attack), Republicans will do everything they can to portray their presidential ticket in 2008 as a "clean slate" and to minimize their association with a deeply unpopular administration. Every time Democrats criticize the Bush administration, they need to think in terms of associations: What will make this criticism stick to the Republican Party and its nominees in 2008 and beyond, not just to a failed administration? Virtually every sentence Democrats utter should be about "Bush and the Republican Party" or "Bush and his rubber-stamp Congress." Democrats should note at every turn that rubber-stamp Republicans have been accomplices to every mistake this administration has made. </p>
<p>The final component to effective branding is not what a party says but what it does. The way Democrats handle their confrontation with the White House on the firing of the U.S. attorneys is as important to the party's brand on national defense as the way they handle the confrontation on the funding of the Iraq War itself. Why? Because it sends a meta-message about how they handle confrontations. The willingness of Democratic leaders such as Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi to stare down the president has done far more to reassure the American people that Democrats know how to deal with aggression than all the efforts over the last five years to show that they, too, "support our troops." </p>
<p>The only other prerequisite to building a coherent brand is to know what you stand for. That may be the hardest one of all. </p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 22 Apr 2007 17:11:08 +0000146205 at http://prospect.orgDrew WestenGut Instinctshttp://prospect.org/article/gut-instincts
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>In politics, we tend to think in terms of issues and policies. And as the dust begins to settle on the midterm elections, pollsters and pundits have begun to settle on the meaning of the elections: "Voters were angry about Iraq," or "Voters were disgusted by corruption in Washington," or the economy finally mattered. </p>
<p>Just six months ago, the electorate was split on Iraq, corruption had little traction, and even pocketbook issues were off the radar screen. What changed? My own research as a psychologist -- and a close political observer -- as well as a close reading of 40 years of electoral history, suggests that, in the final analysis, what matters most in elections is what voters are <em>feeling</em> -- whether they're excited, proud, angry, or afraid. Iraq didn't suddenly become a quagmire. Jack Abramoff didn't suddenly start passing around a little cash. A stagnant minimum wage didn't suddenly start pinching working families. Feelings matter because they push voters' buttons -- and in turn determine the buttons voters push. </p>
<p>In the 2006 election, the Democrats won because they finally connected on a visceral level, and the twin towers that had been working for Republicans since 9-11 -- fear and hate -- just weren't smoldering anymore.</p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p><strong>Winning States of Mind</strong></p>
<p>With all our focus on issues and policy debates, on red states and blue states, what's easy to forget is the voters' state of mind. Our brains are filled with networks of associations -- bundles of thoughts, feelings, images, and ideas that have become connected over time, so that activation of one part of a network activates the rest. When a politician says "liberal," activation spreads in voters' brains to whatever is associated with it. For most Americans, that means <em>elite, tax and spend, out of touch, Massachusetts</em>, and a whole host of associations that activate negative emotions. </p>
<p>That's branding. It's branding so effective that no Democratic presidential nominee has dared call himself a liberal in over 20 years -- and no self-proclaimed liberal has won in over four decades. If you shape voters' networks, you shape their feelings. And if you shape their feelings, you win elections. </p>
<p>Shaping the networks that shape the electoral landscape is about linking one thought, idea, image, or feeling to another. Branding is nothing but effective dot-connecting. Republicans kept winning because they have been connecting the dots so successfully that even good progressives can't even say "liberal" without cringing. The Republicans lost this election because they were no longer the only ones connecting the dots. </p>
<p>The Iraq War was a disaster in June, but it wasn't an <em>electoral</em> disaster for the right until the Democrats, emboldened by polls, more critical media coverage, and Ned Lamont's initially successful anti-war insurgency in August, began to connect the dots -- for example, to the idea of a civil war. Once that dot started to become connected in voters' minds, it followed that our soldiers were fighting in someone else's civil war. And then voters got angry. </p>
<p>It also helped that the media, and then the Democrats, began challenging the crucial connection between two dots the Republicans had connected, unchallenged, since 2002, under the rubric of the "war on terror": Saddam (hence Iraq) and Osama (hence terrorism). The Democrats connected the dots to suggest that Bush's failure on Iraq made him untrustworthy on terrorism. Conversely, if Iraq wasn't connected to the "war on terror," then what were we doing in Iraq? Until late in the summer of 2006, the Republicans were the only ones telling a coherent story -- on Iraq, terrorism, or virtually anything else that mattered to the public.</p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p><strong>Connecting the Dots</strong></p>
<p>It is no accident that the Democratic Party began to run away with the election only in October, when its candidates all over the country ran ad after ad connecting Republican candidates to their increasingly unpopular president. Republicans tried to run, but they couldn't hide from the association. Aristotle articulated the basic principle 2,300 years ago: If people experience two things together enough times, they will associate them. And what both Pavlov and Freud recognized was that if they associate them strongly enough, the feelings activated by one will be activated by the other. </p>
<p>Some of the most effective Democratic ads were the ones that not only linked the president and his unpopular war with a local candidate but used film clips of the candidate using phrases such as "stay the course" that were already indelibly linked to George W. Bush. Equally effective were ads that connected inconvenient dots -- such as an ad run by Bob Casey against Rick Santorum, versions of which ultimately ran all over the country, which included the following narration and images: </p>
<blockquote><p>Narrator: <em>Rick Santorum's record?</em> [An image of Santorum appears, against the backdrop of the Capitol, with words superimposed to underscore the narration] <em>Voted three times to give himself a pay raise</em> [An image appears of a working-class woman hard at work] <em>while voting 13 times against raising the minimum wage.</em> [An image appears of a smiling Santorum sitting next to a grinning George Bush, with words again underscoring the narrative] <em>And he votes 98 percent of the time with George Bush. Even to privatize Social Security.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>What made this ad so powerful were three features. First, it connected the dots between Santorum's generosity to himself and his lack of generosity to the hard-working men and women of Pennsylvania. Each of those facts alone carried little weight for many voters. But put them together, and you begin putting together a network that tells a story about the kind of person who would raise his own salary by more money than a person working 40 hours a week even earns. </p>
<p>Second, networks link more than words. The most powerful networks -- the ones most likely to stick in voters' minds and to elicit emotion -- are the ones that link words and ideas with visual images (e.g., the hard-working woman on top of whom were superimposed the words, "Voted 13 Times Against Raising the Minimum Wage") and sounds (e.g., the narrator's voice and inflection, as he contrasted Santorum's pay raise with the minimum wage, underscoring the juxtaposition). </p>
<p>Third, whereas Democrats have often numbed the electorate with facts and figures, the 98 percent figure linked Santorum so powerfully to Bush that it made clear, as Casey put it in an interview on <em>Meet the Press</em>, "Tim, when you have two politicians in Washington that agree 98 percent of the time, one of them's really not necessary." </p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p><strong>Flying Hate Below the Radar</strong></p>
<p>On Election Day, Democrats outflanked Republicans in every closely contested Senate race except one: Tennessee. At first blush, this is surprising, given that Harold Ford Jr., like so many of the other candidates who defeated Republican incumbents (Bob Casey, Sherrod Brown, and Claire McCaskill, for example), was an emotionally compelling candidate. However, if we take a look at the way the Republicans used a sophisticated understanding of how networks operate, we can see both the limits of conventional analyses of the ad campaign ("Was it racist, or wasn't it?") that led to the rapid decline in Ford's poll numbers, and what his campaign might have done to counteract it. </p>
<p>The infamous ad, created by a prot¨¦g¨¦ of Karl Rove, was actually part of a broader stealth campaign orchestrated by now Senator-elect Bob Corker and the Republican National Committee. The stealth attack, designed to fly far enough below the radar to allow "plausible deniability" of racist intent, capitalized on the way neural networks work. If I were to ask you to name the first American automobile company that comes to mind, many of you will would say "Ford," even though you could just as easily have responded with one of the other Big Three. The reason is that I've just "primed" your neural networks with Harold <em>Ford</em>, putting anything associated with "Ford" at a heightened state of unconscious activation. </p>
<p>The Republican campaign against Harold Ford Jr. played these kinds of networks like a fiddle at Opryland. As Corker fell slightly behind Ford in the polls, he began describing himself as the "real Tennessean," using as a cover story that Ford was a city slicker from Washington. This was a curious charge to make, given that Corker had been attacking Ford and his family for being part of a Tennessee political machine (although once again Corker had plausible deniability because Ford had spent part of his childhood in Washington). The Republican National Committee then ran an ad the Corker campaign disavowed once it drew national attention, allowing him to claim distance while taking advantage of its effects. But Corker then followed it up with another ad of his own that makes clear that the ads were coordinated. </p>
<p>The ad that drew media interest began with a scantily clad white woman declaring excitedly, "I met Harold at the <em>Playboy</em> party!" She returns at the end of the ad, with a seductive wink, saying "Harold, call me." The obvious goal was to activate a network about black men having sex with white women, something about which many white men, including those who are not consciously prejudiced, still feel queasy. </p>
<p>The "call me" line came just after the ad had ostensibly ended with the following words on the screen: "Harold Ford. He's Just Not Right." When I first saw the ad, I thought the syntax was peculiar. What did they mean by "He's just not right?" That's a term often used to describe someone with a psychiatric problem, and no one was suggesting that Ford was deranged. </p>
<p>Then I realized what was wrong. If you were going to use that syntax, you'd say "He's just not right <em>for Tennessee</em>." What the viewer of the ad is not aware of (unless he or she is Tweetie Bird, or has trouble pronouncing r's), is that another network is being activated unconsciously. This second network was primed not only by the racial associations to the ad itself but by the broader campaign emphasizing that Ford isn't "one of us": "He's just not <em>white</em>."</p>
<p>Then came a Corker radio ad, whose cover story was again to compare and contrast Corker and Ford on the extent to which they're really Tennesseans. Music plays continuously in the background, but every time the narrator turns to talk about Ford, the listener is exposed to the barely audible sound of an African tom-tom. This is the closest ad we have seen to the RATS ad run by George W. Bush in 2000 against Al Gore, which subliminally presented the word RATS when talking about Gore. At the time, the Bush campaign quickly dismissed the idea that a "subliminable" appeal, as then¨CGovernor Bush called it, could have any effect. </p>
<p>However, my colleague Joel Weinberger and I were not so sure. We ran an experiment on the Internet in which we subliminally flashed the word RATS before a photo of an anonymous candidate, and sure enough, it significantly increased people's negative feelings toward him. It had seemed unlikely to me that the word RATS had accidentally found its way into an ad that cost millions of dollars to produce and air. The ads run against Ford suggest that Rove and crew are well aware of recent research on subliminal priming. It is di¡Þcult otherwise to explain the tom-toms, and I have not heard an alternative explanation for them.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, as with the "Willie Horton" ad run against Michael Dukakis in 1988, the Democrats lacked either the knowledge or the nerve to respond with the only known antidote to racial appeals made below the radar of consciousness: Make them conscious. A large body of research suggests that the vast majority of Americans today -- including the vast majority of rural Southerners -- do not believe that the color of a person's skin should have a bearing on the way they vote, and they consciously value fairness. If they knew someone was deliberately manipulating them with quasi-subliminal messages, they would be angry at the perpetrator, and it would backfire.</p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p><strong>Raising Consciousness</strong> </p>
<p>Harold Ford Jr. could not have been the messenger, as he well knew (evidenced by his muted response), because doing so would have activated another network that would have blown up in his face: "Black person crying racism." What he needed was a Southern white elder statesman to do it for him. Suppose, for example, Bill Clinton, who stumped for Ford in the final days of the campaign, had addressed himself directly to Corker in a speech:</p>
<blockquote><p>Mr. Corker, what you have done injecting race into this campaign is a disgrace. The people of this state know what a skunk smells like, and they know when they've been sprayed. You knew exactly what you were doing when you ran that ad with the white woman saying with a wink, "Call me, Harold." The first time I saw that ad, a phrase came to my mind that I hadn't heard in 40 years: "All they want is our white women." And if it came to my mind, it came to a lot of people's minds. And that was just the point.</p>
<p>The Reverend Martin Luther King understood people's feelings about interracial dating and marriage 40 years ago. He knew that even decent people who harbored no ill will toward black people could be made uncomfortable if you got them to picture a black man with a white woman. He didn't want the rights of his children, and millions of others, to get caught up in people's feelings about what they called back then the "mixing" of the races, so he made his intentions clear: "I want the white man to be my brother," he said, "not my brother-in-law."</p>
<p>So when you realized you couldn't beat a strong, straight-talking, devoutly religious young black man named Harold Ford Jr. for Senate in the state of Tennessee in a fair fight, you decided to beat him however you could. So you started talking on the stump about how Harold Ford Jr., whose family has lived in this state for decades -- who was baptized in a church right here in Tennessee -- wasn't <em>really</em> from Tennessee, that he wasn't <em>really</em> one of <em>us</em>. Who'd you mean by us, Bob? </p>
<p>This time, it was <em>you</em> who were doing the winking. </p>
<p>And we all saw it. And how 'bout those tom-toms? That was a nice touch. You could pretend you had nothing to do with the "Call me, Harold" ad. You could say that somehow the Republican Party just put it out there without your knowledge, and when people started to call it racist, you could come out and piously demand that it be taken off the air.</p>
<p>But then how do you explain those radio ads with the subliminal African tom-toms? Did you really think you could get away with trying to influence people with subliminal racist messages, saying, "Don't vote for Harold Ford, he's of African descent?"</p>
<p>Let me tell <em>you</em> something about the good and decent people of Tennessee, Mr. Corker. They aren't racists like you. They're God-loving people who believe that regardless of the color of your skin, we're all God's children. </p>
<p>Just a few weeks ago, the people of Virginia sent George Allen a clear message that we don't tolerate people like the two of you anymore. After he called a fellow Virginian a name because of the color of his skin -- and told him he wasn't a <em>real</em> Virginian -- sound familiar, Bob? -- he dropped 10 points in the polls. Why? Because the people of Virginia are decent people, who read their Bible, and know that it preaches love, not hate. And I've been to this state enough times, and prayed with enough people here, to know that the people of Tennessee read that same book. </p>
<p>So you want to know what it means to be a <em>real</em> Tennessean? It means to understand the words of our Founding Fathers: that <em>all</em> men are created equal.<br />
The difference between Harold Ford Jr. and you isn't in the darkness of your skin. It's in the darkness in of your heart.</p></blockquote>
<p>Several principles are embodied in this response. First and foremost, it reflects two decades of research showing that on matters of race, our better angels are our conscious values. The vast majority of people, including rural Southerners, no longer consciously believe in discrimination. Where people tend to show their prejudice is in their <em>unconscious</em> networks, which will likely show the residues of racism for generations. If you let a racist attack linger unconsciously, it will have its intended effects. That's why you want to keep it conscious. </p>
<p>Indeed, Virginia Senator George Allen's campaign went into free-fall after Allen spoke the language of explicit racism. Voters (even those who don't speak Tunisian French) understood precisely what's in a man's heart who calls someone <em>macaca</em> because of the color of his skin -- especially when he follows it with, "Welcome to America, and the <em> real </em> world of Virginia." The difference between Allen and Corker was that Allen made the mistake of flying his prejudice at the wrong altitude. </p>
<p>A second principle embodied in the response above is that it does not equivocate. It does not invite Corker to engage in a he said/she said. It plainly states that he's a racist in a way that connects the dots so that the message is heard clearly. </p>
<p>Third, it redefines the "we." What Corker and the RNC were trying to do was to portray Ford as a member of an out group, to turn him into something other than "one of us." If you want to win elections, you need people to identify with you, not to see you as foreign or different from them. Brain-scanning data from our laboratory have shown that when people view pictures of their own party's candidates, circuits at the very front of the brain turn a switch on, the same circuits that typically become active when people are thinking about themselves. The response above would have turned the tables on Corker, to turn <em>him</em> into something other than "one of us," to define what good and decent people do and to make clear that he isn't one of them. It contrasts the decent people of Tennessee with racists like Corker, rather than allowing him to connect the implicit dots between "us" and "white people."</p>
<p>Finally, and just as importantly, it conveys a message that a Democrat can be a tough son-of-a-bitch; Democrats aren't going to be messed with. This is important both for the message it sends to the public -- that Democrats can be strong and aggressive when attacked, a crucial message in the post¨C9-11 era -- and the one it sends to the Republicans, that they can't get away with the race-baiting and code words they've been using since the 1960s, that they'll pay the price if they try it again.</p>
<p>It wasn't until late in the election that Democrats abandoned warmed-over milquetoast like "Together, we can do better," started connecting the dots they'd left unconnected since 2002, and began to show their teeth. Only then did they earn the respect of the American people.</p>
<p><em>Drew Westen is a professor at Emory University and author of the forthcoming </em>The Political Brain.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 20 Nov 2006 01:45:35 +0000145859 at http://prospect.orgDrew Westen